Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

Mus emphasized the profound sense of patriotism and national identity animating the Vietnamese. This moral fervor, he plainly implied, was as deep as that felt by Frenchmen living under the yoke of the Nazi occupation, and it had moved Vietnamese to resist foreign occupation throughout their history. “In short, what the Vietnamese have preserved, through all the vicissitudes of their history, is a community of blood, of language, of sentiment,” Mus wrote. “One can say that this is their essential milieu and one from which the Annamite never willingly distances himself for any length of time. For anyone who is familiar with this people, the background to this state of things, the model that is more or less unconscious, yet a concrete manifestation of this communitarian ideal, is the village. This is the form in which the Annamite lives as a social being, and the basis of his patriotism.”